One of Kanye West’s catchphrases of late has been, “This is not regular!” As his brags go, it’s a pretty smart one. While some of his special achievements are more dubious than others (see: evangelizing for dad fashion, putting out fashion zines filled with unclothed women, continuing to troll Taylor Swift), it’s inarguable that West really does find ways to be exceptional. For example: The news that overnight Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo was “refreshed and redelivered” with changes, including a new song, is not regular. It is not regular for a major album to be both in the market and a work in progress, revised and updated at its creator’s whim like software or bits of the Harry Potter canon.

Related Story

Albums of course have, in the past, been released in remastered versions, demo versions, remix versions, and deluxe bonus-track versions. But those typically fall into the category of extras: Once you’re heard the original, you could go and hear the new thing if you want. West’s doing something else. Outside of a $20 download on West’s site, it’s only legally available on streaming platforms, which means the canonical copy is in the cloud, able to be tinkered with or even deleted—as it was for a few hours on Tidal last night—as the musician sees fit.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that some musician or another would eventually make use of the fundamental ownership change caused by streaming technology for aesthetic purposes. What’s less obvious is whether that would be a good thing for the music itself. Isn’t this yet another example of the internet’s immediacy eroding quality? Doesn’t the ability to polish a product into eternity reduce the incentive for creators to nail it the first time? The fact that West worked until the very last hour on Pablo even after multiple release-date delays, and the fact that the result is the most uneven album of West’s career, suggests yes. But it’s hard to complain when the phenomenon gives rise to a new track like “Saint Pablo,” added as The Life of Pablo’s closer last night (the eve after the announcement of West’s forthcoming Saint Pablo Tour).

“Saint Pablo” feels like a “classic” Kanye West song in a way that little of his 2016 output has. It has a wistful, steady beat (built off a Jay Z sample but reminiscent of “Runaway”); a sturdy, hummable chorus (from the soulful British singer Sampha); and West rapping with political edge, self reflection, humor, and a logically clear through-line. He has said the song was inspired by him confessing on Twitter to being $53 million in debt, which means it likely was recorded after The Life of Pablo’s February 14 release (unofficial versions have appeared online since shortly after that time).

Pop music’s thrill comes from familiar things being made new—the Pablo transformations make that appeal almost literal.

Indeed, West’s “Saint Pablo” verse opens with him talking about his wife admonishing him for being too loose with his money. It progresses from there, suggesting that debt is a sign of him finding success on his own terms: “The media said he’s way out of control … I’m not out of control, I’m just not in they control.” In verse two West turns his attention to race, saying that black people need to help each other succeed, which then bleeds into an explanation of why Kanye sided with Jay Z’s Tidal streaming service rather than Apple. His rap closes with a tight little ur-Kanye couplet of petty dissing and epic bragging—“She got the same shoes as my wife but she copped ‘em at Aldo / Modern day MJ with a Off the Wall flow”—before Sampha poignantly guides the song out.

The track’s lyrics also mention that a million people have illegally downloaded The Life of Pablo, which is perhaps an odd thing to boast about for an artist trying to pay his bills. But West is touting his cultural reach, and he’s also signaling that he understands how his album is being received. Hardcore fans should by now have a copy of the original version of Pablo on their hard drive, allowing them to tell whenever West makes a subtle change to Pablo—say, bumping up the vocal levels on “Waves” or making a slight edit to Chance the Rapper’s verse on “Ultralight Beam.” Obsessively comparing and contrasting as West fiddles can be an essential part of enjoying Pablo for the true believers.

For others, the experience of the album shifts in more subtle ways due to it being, as West said, “living breathing changing creative expression.” I haven’t regularly spent time with Pablo since the weeks after its Madison Square Garden premiere event: It has its virtues, but to my ears it’s a contender for West’s worst album. So I’ve not closely tracked the bulk of the changes West has thus far made to it (most of them were implemented in April, though Redditors point out that last night’s update tweaked the previous closer “Fade”). Listening anew is a strange experience, like coming home after a trip and suspecting that someone has been nudged your things a few inches from where you left them. A choral line comes in where you don’t expect it; a rhythm suddenly hits harder than you remember it doing; was that synth tone there before?

It’s a jarring feeling, but also an exciting one. Pop music’s thrill comes from familiar things being made new—the Pablo transformations make that appeal almost literal. With more spins, you can decide whether or not the new tracks are “better.” But the intriguing sense of dislocation might be a virtue itself, one of the many things West has done that aren’t regular.

Most Popular

In the landscape where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed, a scientist is trying to understand a natural phenomenon that has eluded explanation for decades.

One evening earlier this spring, German naturalist Norbert Jürgens strayed from his expedition in the Namib Desert. He walked away from his campsite beside Leopard Rock, a huge pile of schist slabs stacked like left-over roofing tiles, and into a vast plain ringed with red-burnished hills. He had 20 minutes of light left before sunset, and he intended to use them.

This next part may sound like a reenactment from a nature documentary, but trust me: This is how it went down.

Off by himself, Jürgens dropped down to his knees. He sank his well-tanned arms in the sand up to the elbows. As he rooted around, he told me later, he had a revelation.

At the time, I was watching from the top of Leopard Rock, which offered a bird’s-eye view of both Jürgens and his expedition’s quarry. Across the plain, seemingly stamped into its dry, stubbly grass, were circles of bare ground, each about the size of an aboveground pool. Jürgens, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was digging—and pondering—in one of these bare patches.

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

The 9-year-old has built a huge following with profane Instagram posts, but the bravado of “the youngest flexer of the century” masks a sadder tale about fame and exploitation.

In mid-February, a mysterious 9-year-old by the name of Lil Tay began blowing up on Instagram.

“This is a message to all y’all broke-ass haters, y’all ain't doing it like Lil Tay,” she shouts as she hops into a red Mercedes, hands full of wads of cash. “This is why all y’all fucking haters hate me, bitch. This shit cost me $200,000. I’m only 9 years old. I don’t got no license, but I still drive this sports car, bitch. Your favorite rapper ain’t even doing it like Lil Tay.”

Referring to herself as “the youngest flexer of the century,” Lil Tay quickly garnered a fan base of millions, including big name YouTubers who saw an opportunity to capitalize on her wild persona. In late January, RiceGum, an extremely influential YouTube personality dedicated an entire roast video to Lil Tay.

The text reflected not only the president’s signature syntax, but also the clash between his desire for credit and his intuition to walk away.

Donald Trump’s approach to North Korea has always been an intensely personal one—the president contended that his sheer force of will and negotiating prowess would win the day, and rather than use intermediaries, he planned for a face-to-face meeting, with himself and Kim Jong Un on either side of a table.

So Trump’s notice on Thursday that he was canceling the June 12 summit in Singapore was fitting. It arrived in the form of a letter that appears to have been written by the president himself. The missive features a Trumpian mix of non sequiturs, braggadocio, insults, flattery, and half-truths. Whether the dramatic letter marks the end of the current process or is simply a negotiating feint, it matches the soap-operatic series of events that preceded it. Either way, it displays the ongoing conflict between Trump’s desire for pageantry and credit and his longstanding dictum that one must be willing to walk away from the negotiating table.

The Americans and the North Koreans were all set for a historic meeting. Then they started talking about Libya.

Of all the countries that might have acted as a spoiler for the summit in Singapore between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un—China, Russia, Japan, the United States and North Korea themselves—the one that doomed it was unexpected. It isn’t even involved in North Korea diplomacy and is locateda long 6,000 miles away from the Korean Peninsula. It’s Libya.

Yet Libya ought to have been top of mind. It’s notoriously difficult to determine what motivates the strategic choices and polices of North Korea’s leaders, but among the factors that has been evident for some time is Kim Jong Un’s fear of ending up like Muammar al-Qaddafi. The Libyan strongman was pulled from a drainage pipe and shot to death by his own people following a U.S.-led military intervention during the Arab Spring in 2011. The North Korean government views its development of nuclear weapons—a pursuit Qaddafi abandoned in the early 2000s, when his nuclear program was far less advanced than North Korea’s, in exchange for the easing of sanctions and other promised benefits—as its most reliable shield against a hostile United States that could very easily inflict a similar fate on Kim. We know this because the North Korean government has repeatedly said as much. “The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency observed in 2016.

A short—and by no means exhaustive—list of the open questions swirling around the president, his campaign, his company, and his family.

President Trump speculated on Tuesday that “if” the FBI placed a spy inside his campaign, that would be one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. On Wednesday morning on Twitter, the “if” dropped away—and Trump asserted yesterday’s wild surmise as today’s fact. By afternoon, a vast claque of pro-Trump talkers repeated the president’s fantasies and falsehoods in their continuing project to represent Donald Trump as an innocent victim of a malicious conspiracy by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice.

The president’s claims are false, but they are not fantasies. They are strategies to fortify the minds of the president’s supporters against the ever-mounting evidence against the president. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show in their new book about impeachment, an agitated and committed minority can suffice to protect a president from facing justice for even the most strongly proven criminality.

In excusing his Arrested Development castmate’s verbal abuse of Jessica Walter, the actor showed how Hollywood has justified bad behavior for generations.

“What we do for a living is not normal,” Jason Bateman said in Wednesday’s New York Times interviewwith the cast of Arrested Development, in an effort to address his co-star Jeffrey Tambor’s admitted verbal abuse of Jessica Walter. “Therefore the process is not normal sometimes, and to expect it to be normal is to not understand what happens on set. Again, not to excuse it.” As Hollywood continues to grapple with widespread revelations of hostile work environments, institutional sexism, and sexual misconduct on and off set, Bateman insisted that he wasn’t trying to explain away an actor’s bad behavior—while displaying, over and over, exactly how his industry does it.

Bateman’s glaring mistake in the interview—for which he has already apologized—is how he rushed to defend Tambor from Walter’s account of Tambor screaming at her on the set of Arrested Development years ago. In doing so, Bateman defaulted to every entrenched cultural script of minimizing fault, downplaying misbehavior, and largely attributing Tambor’s verbal harassment to the unique, circumstantial pressures of acting—a process, he suggested, most onlookers could not hope to understand.

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

The bombastic legal adviser to Stormy Daniels is taking cues from the era of O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky.

On cable news these days, there are very few people who have approached President Trump’s ubiquity. In fact, there is only one, and his name is Michael Avenatti. (Stormy who?)

Avenatti is not the first attorney to understand how the publicity game is played. Litigators are often like this: brash, aggressive, and sophisticated media manipulators. But Avenatti is the first celebrity lawyer of the Trump age, and it’s for that reason that he has become ultra-famous: Everything to do with Trump becomes, for good or ill, a star. And so it is with Avenatti, who in the public imagination has become not just “Stormy Daniels’s lawyer Michael Avenatti,” but simply “Michael Avenatti,” and appears to live inside your TV set.

The billionaire’s Twitter tirade was so ill-informed it led to a subtweet from his former head of communications.

Elon Musk’s screed against the media began with a story about Tesla.

“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” the entrepreneur tweeted Wednesday, with a link to a post on the website Electrek. The author of that post criticized news coverage of recent Tesla crashes and delays in the production of the Model 3, calling it “obsessive” and saying there’s been a “general increase of misleading clickbait.”

Musk followed that tweet with an hours-long tirade in which he suggested that journalists write negative stories about Tesla to get “max clicks” and “earn advertising dollars or get fired,” blamed the press for the election of President Donald Trump, and polled users on whether he should create a website that rates “the core truth” of articles and tracks “the credibility score” of journalists, which he would consider naming Pravda, like the Soviet state-run, propaganda-ridden news agency.